The Time of the Ghost has such a warm, befuddling opening that for the first few pages, I was convinced I had read the book sometime in my childhood and forgotten. (I hadn’t.) I was tugged along for the confused wanderings of a panicked ghost who doesn’t know who she is or what’s happened. It was an unusual beginning, as there was nowhere to quite put my feet on the ground – but the mystery was entrancing enough that I didn’t mind. Always a nod to Diana Wynne Jones’s craft when I read something I logically should dislike, but loved reading anyway.

For what seems like a long while, we simply follow the ghost around, perceiving the memories that awaken as she stumbles across the people and places that she knows once had so much meaning to her. Early on it could be frustrating to read, because a ghost doesn’t have much agency when she can’t talk to anyone or move any objects. However, our ghost learns a few tricks that get her noticed by her sisters and their friends, and the plot rolls along.

What’s fun about the book is that, more than any other DWJ book I’ve read to date, it’s at least somewhat autobiographical. Diana was one of three sisters, not four. As far as I know, none of them ever haunted as a ghost. However, her parents really did run a house for teenagers, leaving little time for the girls, who were indeed expected to look after themselves in a little side cottage. Diana’s sister Ursula really did tie her hair in two knots on her forehead – their mother didn’t notice for six months. And her sister Isobel really was almost suffocated when her sisters hoisted her up so she could fly as a fairy, hanging from a ceiling beam by skipping ropes.

I think Diana saw herself as mostly Cart and a little bit Sally – the oldest and sometimes meanest, but she was the most sensible of the sisters and did her best to take care of them. I loved the characterization of the sisters in the book. Each was riddled with complex flaws, but they loved and cared for each other in a deep, saturating way.

Finding Diana in the story kept me interested through the slow parts, but after a while the plot took over on its own. Around the halfway point, everything gets twisted up. The truths of the book start doubling back on themselves. Reading in bed the other evening, I was about to close the book and go to sleep, but my eyes slipped to a key sentence at the bottom of the page. I sat up, yelled “what?!,” and promptly read 50 more pages.

There’s a swift, dark undercurrent to this book that surfaces toward the end. Worship games and blood sacrifices give way to an ancient, evil spirit with a mortal grasp on the living. Only the ghost can see how real the danger is.

The story’s ending was rapid, leaving the reader caught between relief and disquiet. It seems appropriate to be haunted by The Time of the Ghost.